The present invention relates to dyeing of textile yarn and more particularly to dyeing textile yarn in multiple colors of unpredictably random distribution throughout the length of yarn.
The elimination of repeating patterns of multiple colors in dyeing textile yarn has long been sought to satisfy the popular demand for randomly colored fabric for garments and especially for carpets. The common commercial means for accomplishing this include, inter alia, dripping dye on travelling yarn strands, and intermittently bringing sections of travelling yarn strands into contact with printing rolls. These systems require complicated and expensive applicator equipment, as well as sophisticated control devices, such as electronic program units, to effect anything approaching pure random dye application. Also, these systems require the additional cost and operational problems of winding equipment for collecting the yarn from the system. On the other hand, dyeing of yarn in batches in the form it is collected from other processing operations, such as in cans or skeins, has not heretofore been commercially adapted to produce truly random dyeing. Skeins, for example, may be dyed in multiple colors by immersing different portions in different colors, but because of the uniform distribution of the yarn in the skein and the relatively short length of yarn in each winding of a skein the resulting yarn has relatively short uniform lengths of different colors in an easily detectible repeating pattern.
By the present invention, however, yarn may be economically and effectively used in the form it is collected in a preceding processing operation and it is dyed inexpensively and simply in multiple colors in a manner that uniquely results in an unpredictably random distribution of colors and color lengths in the ultimate yarn strand.